Gulag for the day

Neil Farquhar has an article in The New York Times about a squabble over whose history prevails in the new Russia:

Yuri Brodsky, who has dedicated his life to exposing the dark secrets of the ancient Solovetsky Monastery (photos), pointed at a small, dirty courtyard window blocked by a crooked red brick wall. The bricks were a rare leftover from the nearly two decades when the fortresslike monastery served as the Soviet Union’s first gulag, remnants of a horrific period initially detailed by the Nobel laureate and historian Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
“All traces of the labor camp are gradually being destroyed and removed,” said Brodsky, a disheveled figure with short white hair.
Russia has been wrangling over how to commemorate the gulag victims, an emotionally charged process that culminated this month when Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev recognized the millions who suffered under Soviet political repression.
Activists were encouraged by a directive he signed, but expressed several misgivings. First, it was essentially nonbinding, with no legal or budgetary weight. Second, it was Medvedev who signed it, not the man who matters most in Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin.
Finally, it contradicted what has actually been happening in places like Solovetsky: downplaying the legacy of oppression. For the first time since the fall of Communism, neither the church nor the government sent a representative to an annual ceremony on 7 August 2015 commemorating the camp’s victims.
Likewise, Perm-36, a former gulag that had been preserved as a museum of political repression, was transformed this year into one that focuses on the camp’s labor history. A recent exhibition there extolled Perm-36’s achievements in timber production.
Such dilution has become more prevalent, especially at sites now controlled by the Russian Orthodox Church. Critics say the church sidesteps questions of accountability as it emphasizes the ecclesiastical role of these sites.
That trend produced an intense tug-of-war over the remote islands on which the monastery is found. The Solovetsky Islands, informally known as Solovki, are in the White Sea, a hundred miles below the Arctic Circle.
The debate pits monks and religious pilgrims against those who believe the site should be consecrated to the countless political prisoners who died here. Villagers who fear expulsion by the church have been drawn into the argument too, as have tour operators who promote the area’s spare beauty and the chance to view beluga whales and other wildlife. UNESCO is also involved, warning that excessive reconstruction might jeopardize the status of the fortified monastery, founded in 1436, as a World Heritage site.
The church sees the monastery as an important testament to the power of faith because it has survived so long in such a remote location. “Many national holy shrines were created in desertlike silence, but as time went by, cities rose around them,” the monastery’s abbot, Archimandrite Porfiry, said in an emailed response to written questions. “At Solovki it is easy to find solitude, so important for the soul.” He characterized the gulag period at the site, from 1923 to 1939, as a mere interlude in the monastery’s long history. However, it looms large for those who want to commemorate its victims.
For one thing, the monastery is the only place where the Bolshevik government ever, albeit briefly, acknowledged holding political prisoners. (The czars used it for that purpose, too, until 1903.) Among the monastery’s first political prisoners were Russian leftists who allied with the Bolsheviks during the revolution.
“This is a very complicated problem,” said Arseny B. Roginsky, chairman of Memorial, an organization founded in 1992 to commemorate Stalin’s victims, but which is now frequently attacked by Putin loyalists as a nest of “foreign agents”.
Roginsky said the clergy at Solovetsky and other sites pray for the dead without examining culpability. “There are two memories competing there,” he said. “Our memory is looking for who is guilty, and the church is not. The state feels safe passing this memory to the church.”
Several historians said that was especially true under Putin, who once worked for the KGB, the secret police agency whose precursors created the camp. In Solzhenitsyn’s telling, the labor camp system was a secret police experiment that spawned a prolonged nightmare, “born and come to maturity on Solovki”.
In the long days of the Arctic summer, it is hard to picture the dystopian scenes described by camp survivors. The main island, covered by thick pine forests and dotted with lakes, has a bucolic if dilapidated air. Cows and goats graze freely outside the monastery walls, in a village with a year-round population of about a thousand.
The islands were considered sacred long before the monastery was built; pre-Christian cultures left behind complex stone labyrinths, built as portals to the afterlife. The monastery’s turreted granite walls were finished around 1601, and withstood a British naval bombardment during the Crimean War.
When Brodsky, 69, first visited the islands in 1970, many traces of the long-closed labor camp remained. An engineer and photographer, Brodsky began documenting it all. He tracked down camp survivors across Russia, at a time when even mentioning the Solovki gulag was taboo. The KGB learned of his project and tried to get him fired.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and some archives were opened, Brodsky created an exhibit and wrote a book, Solovki, a 527-page compendium of documents, photographs, and testimony from former prisoners.
Former prisoners told him that inmates worked twelve hours a day at arduous tasks like felling trees, often with little more than their bare hands. They wore whatever clothes they were arrested in, which eventually fell to rags. In the winter they slept in piles to ward off the icy cold; in the summer, the mosquitoes were so aggressive that one excruciating punishment was simply to be tied up naked outdoors. A remote church on Sekirnaya Hill became a “special punishment chamber”; few sent there returned.
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“The idea of this camp was to change someone from an individual into part of an anonymous crowd,” Brodsky said. It cost many of them their lives, though the overall toll has never been publicly revealed.
The monks, these days, about a hundred, began restoring the monastery a decade ago. Archimandrite Porfiry, the abbot, said major reconstruction was necessary because many of the buildings were in terrible shape. The government plans to spend about two million dollars a year for five years there.
Brodsky said the monks whittled away at his exhibition in the monastery, and eventually pushed it out. In 2011, the Ministry of Culture replaced the exhibit with a small museum in a former barracks in the village, with the abbot as director. Brodsky says the museum soft-pedals gulag life by emphasizing gentler aspects, like the prison theater. The only exhibit within the monastery grounds now focuses on the repression of the clergy.
The abbot said it was appropriate to house the gulag museum in a building built for the camp, and some visitors, like Vitaly Korzhikhin, 24, agreed. “People come to the monastery for different purposes; some seek salvation or support,” said Korzhikhin, a churchgoing mobile phone engineer. “For them, it would be unpleasant to see this exhibition inside the walls.”
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, a senior church official, said that in the last years of the Soviet Union, the monastery was plagued by “barbarous tourism”, including camping, loud music, and public drunkenness.
“It is a place of prayer, it is place of mourning, it is where many innocent people, who were outstanding representatives of the intelligentsia, died,” Father Chaplin said. “It is a memorial place for many people, believers and not. It should remain such a memorial place.”
Even so, efforts to commemorate gulag victims without church approval have tended to disappear. The Memorial organization erected a monument in 2003 to the first six political prisoners who were shot, for example, but the stone slabs vanished within days.
The commemoration tug of war has played out in other odd ways. A depiction of the monastery on Russia’s five-hundred-ruble note initially showed it as it was during the gulag period, without crosses. The image was later altered under church pressure.
The whole story of Solovki deserves to be studied and remembered, Brodsky said, but with Russia in such a nationalist mood, he saw little hope of that. “History cannot be changed, but it can be analyzed,” he said. “We should admit the errors we made. Repentance does not mean we should hide our heads under the floor; rather, we should look back and think about the path we followed.”

Rico says it's the old church-versus-state problem, and who wants to admit to mistakes?